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Special
Education Needs |
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CASE STUDIES
Sally & Gary
Sally is 15 and is a bright girl. She
is in the top stream for English, history and French and is expected
to get top grades in most of her GCSEs. However, she is in the
bottom set for Maths. She has always found maths a problem but
has usually found ways of getting round it and is adept at using
a calculator. On working with Sally it was noticed that she could
not apply maths patterns; she could not see how 5 + 3 could relate
to 15 + 13 nor could she understand whether 37 or 32 was nearest
to 40. Although Sally could rhyme off the times tables she could
not apply them. By GCSE stage it was really too late to help Sally
properly; she had developed ingrained avoidance tactics for maths
and had not enough self-confidence to make much progress. |
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Gary is 13. He has dyslexia and has
been receiving help for this. He then told his teacher he found
maths difficult but wanted to do well. In class he said he often
thought he knew the answers and put his hand up only to be laughed
at when he got it wrong. It was discovered that the difficulty
lay in the fact that he found the reading and understanding of
maths questions to be a problem related to his dyslexia. His memory
was also poor and so he was picking up on single words and not
the whole question. When he used a calculator he was entering the
wrong figures and also misreading the answers. The strategy used
here was to work with the learning support teacher in advance of
the lessons, discussing the language which would be used and also
reinforcing basic skills regularly. |
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Acknowledgements & Copyright
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